In late August 1997, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris.

Less than a week later, 87-year-old Mother Teresa died of cardiac arrest in Calcutta.

The two deaths were met with an outpouring of public grief.

One person who didn't participate was the British journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Princess Diana had trodden on a landmine, which I think would have been a very fine way for her to go,

then we could say that in a sense that life and death had some meaning.

His commentary was shockingly unsentimental and unapologetically left wing.

According to him, the royal family were parasites on the British people. And he argued that the Catholic Church's opposition to family planning kept parts of India trapped in poverty.

And you call this the ghoul of Calcutta?

Mother Teresa?

Mother Teresa, the ghoul of Calcutta.

Hitchens loved to attack the conventional wisdom.

All the way through the 1990s, he was extremely skeptical of the U.S.'s muscular foreign policy.

But it wasn't that he hated war.

He identified as a Trotskyist.

For him, the next revolution was always just around the corner.

Hitchens covered the abolition of the Greek monarchy, and he championed the cause of the Kurds.

There was always something very martial about Christopher.

That's Katha Pollitt. Her column ran alongside Hitchens' in the Left Wing magazine The Nation.

You know, his father was a military man. I think there was an appeal in him of war, violence, revolution.

After 9-11, when other nation writers worried about how the U.S. might respond,

Hitchens openly relished the fight to come.

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